There are two things that an Englishman understands, hard words and hard blows. Nothing short of this (generally speaking) excites his attention or interests him in the least. His neighbours have the benefit of the one in war time, and his own countrymen of the other in time of peace. The French express themselves astonished at the feats which our Jack Tars have so often performed. A fellow in that class of life in England will strike his hand through a deal board—first, to shew his strength, which he is proud of; secondly, to give him a sensation, which he is in want of; lastly to prove his powers of endurance, which he also makes a boast of. So qualified, a controversy with a cannon-ball is not much out of his way: a thirty-two pounder is rather an _ugly customer_, but it presents him with a tangible idea (a thing he is always in search of)—and, should it take off his head or carry away one of his limbs, he does not feel the want of the one or care for that of the other. Naturally obtuse, his feelings become hardened by custom; or if there are any qualms of repugnance or dismay left, a volley of oaths, a few coarse jests, and a double allowance of grog soon turn the affair into a pastime. Stung with wounds, stunned with bruises, bleeding and mangled, an English sailor never finds himself so much alive as when he is flung half dead into the cockpit; for he then perceives the extreme consciousness of his existence in his conflict with external matter, in the violence of his will, and his obstinate contempt for suffering. He feels his personal identity on the side of the disagreeable and repulsive; and it is better to feel it so than to be a stock or a stone, which is his ordinary state. Pain puts life into him; action, soul: otherwise, he is a mere log. The English are not like a nation of women. They are not thin-skinned, nervous, or effeminate, but dull and morbid: they look danger and difficulty in the face, and shake hands with death as with a brother. They do not hold up their heads, but they will turn their backs on no man: they delight in doing and in bearing more than others: what every one else shrinks from through aversion to labour or pain, they are attracted to, and go through with, and so far (and so far only) they are a great people. At least, it cannot be denied that they are a _pugnacious_ set. Their heads are so full of this, that if a Frenchman speaks of SCRIBE, the celebrated farce-writer, a young Englishman present will suppose he means Cribb the boxer; and ten thousand people assembled at a prize-fight will witness an exhibition of pugilism with the same breathless attention and delight as the audience at the _Théatre Français_ listen to the dialogue of Racine or Molière. Assuredly, _we_ do not pay the same attention to Shakspeare: but at a boxing-match every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy, as at a French theatre every spectator fancies that the actors on the stage talk, laugh, and make love as he would. A metaphysician might say, that the English perceive objects chiefly by their mere material qualities of solidity, inertness, and impenetrability, or by their own muscular resistance to them; that they do not care about the colour, taste, smell, the sense of luxury or pleasure:—they require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grapple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon. They do not like to smell to a rose, or to taste of made-dishes, or to listen to soft music, or to look at fine pictures, or to make or hear fine speeches, or to enjoy themselves or amuse others; but they will knock any man down who tells them so, and their sole delight is to be as uncomfortable and disagreeable as possible. To them the greatest labour is to be pleased: they hate to have nothing to find fault with: to expect them to smile or to converse on equal terms, is the heaviest tax you can levy on their want of animal spirits or intellectual resources. A drop of pleasure is the most difficult thing to extract from their hard, dry, mechanical, husky frame; a civil word or look is the last thing they can part with. Hence the _matter-of-factness_ of their understandings, their tenaciousness of reason or prejudice, their slowness to distinguish, their backwardness to yield, their mechanical improvements, their industry, their courage, their blunt honesty, their dislike to the frivolous and florid, their love of liberty out of hatred to oppression, and their love of virtue from their antipathy to vice.